Why YOU care about accessibility, and can help!

Accessibility (a11y for short) seems like a niche area of concern for many people. I was thinking about this recently on a hot morning in Spain, walking to the bus station with my wheeled luggage. The sidewalks are thoughtfully cut out for wheelchairs -- and those with luggage! and the kids riding skateboards, and...... the rest of us.

When websites and program output can be parsed by a screen-reader, it is great for blind folks. It is also great for the busy person working and listening, and even for the reader who doesn't have to ignore popup menus and other distractions. In other words, all of us.

There are many more examples, but my point is -- a11y helps everyone. So please - everyone - help KDE focus on accessible software at Randa! Fundraiser is ongoing! Don't pass it by because you think this is niche. Accessible software is better for all.

Stop by https://www.kde.org/fundraisers/randameetings2017/ and give generously, or read more about it first: Randa Meetings 2017: It's All About Accessibility.

Testing A11y in Plasma 5

I made the jump on all available computers, and am now running Plasma5 on the foundation of Kubuntu 14.10 everywhere. Once the upgrade work was done, I filed a few bugs, and then wanted to test accessibility (often abbreviated a11y), since Qt5 has a11y built-in.

Jpwhiting in #kde-accessibility found Frederik's blog: http://blogs.fsfe.org/gladhorn/, where I found that the key was setting up the environment to expose KDE software to the mostly-GNOME a11y applications. For now this must be done via the commandline:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.a11y.applications screen-reader-enabled true

It is a work-around, but it works!

Once orca is installed, and the environment is set up, you will hear each letter as you type, and when you open menus, they are read aloud. I understand it will read IRC channels aloud, but I don't want this! Some people use this method to study while they do something else, which sounds cool.

KDE developers, please test your ported code for accessibility. If you don't have time, please ask for testers to file bugs.

Distro testers, please test your install screens and upgrade paths for, at the very least, successful screen reading. There is really is now no excuse to keep blind users from using our wonderful software.

Qt 5 is accessible! Are we using it to serve our blind users?

Accessible KDE, Kubuntu

KDE is community. We welcome everyone, and make our software work for everyone. So, accessibility is central to all our work, in the community, in testing, coding, documentation. Frederik has been working to make this true in Qt and in KDE for many years, Peter has done valuable work with Simon and Jose is doing testing and some patches to fix stuff.

However, now that KF5 is rolling out, we're finding a few problems with our KDE software such as widgets, KDE configuration modules (kcm) and even websites. However, the a11y team is too small to handle all this! Obviously, we need to grow the team.

So we've decided to make heavier use of the forums, where we might find new testers and folks to fix the problems, and perhaps even people to fix up the https://accessibility.kde.org/ website to be as
awesome as the KDE-Edu site. The Visual Design Group are the leaders here, and they are awesome!

Please drop by #kde-accessibility on Freenode or the Forum https://forum.kde.org/viewforum.php?f=216 to read up on what needs doing, and learn how to test. People stepping up to learn forum
moderation are also welcome. Frederik has recently posted about the BoF: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=216&t=122808

A11y was a topic in the Kubuntu BoF today, and we're going to make a new push to make sure our accessibility options work well out of the box, i.e. from first boot. This will involve working with the Ubuntu a11y team, yeah!

More information is available at
https://community.kde.org/Accessibility and
https://userbase.kde.org/Applications/Accessibility